NOWHERE NEAR DAMASCUS, Steve Meyrick’s debut collection, is a poetic miscellany. Of forms (physical and prosodic) and thoughts; of moments, meditations, memories, myths, and mysteries. “More Pope than prophet,” the poet says of himself and his probing work, more given to scepticism and empiricism than romance or ecstatics; nonetheless, this book, containing as it does its multitudes, wonders and laments and delights and hails as often as it doubts, fears and demurs. Like Alexander Pope, Meyrick sustains a vivid kind klong si suparb, free verse)—he writes here a sort of fragmentary essay that nearly always launches from the world near at hand—the garden, the shore, the train, the crossroads, the family, the personal past, the local trees and birds, the bookshelf, the issues that crowd the newsfeed—into an investigation or a wondering, precisely and memorably articulated, into, for example, the nature of hope, the stickiness of regret, the labours (and rewards) of love, the sadness (and silliness) of ageing, the hard yards of dying, the horror of war, the “polyamory” of places, the moral complexities of belonging, the science of seeing, the ethics of being, the yoga of forgiveness, in particular, oneself. It is hard to think of a topic of importance to our lives in these days that these poems do not, in their fastidious, humane, curious way, probe. From war and climate to diversity and sovereignty, faith and health and friendship. Meyrick has written a book of poems that perpetuates the literary tradition of the “intelligent vernacular” he has treasured as a reader and, as a publisher, seeks to sustain. Nowhere Near Damascus is a book of poems no one will struggle to understand or fail to enjoy, a book that will make you think again about all that it considers and feel gratitude for a life in which you get a chance to do that, guided by this wise, wry voice.